Software is supposed to provide robust solutions meant to improve our experience on any device. Web browsers have become a critical piece of that experience, though not every project has clear intentions, so to speak. Brave is a browser that in theory says it blocks advertising on websites, but in reality does something very different: replace the content with its own ads, and keep 15 percent of the earnings.
When it comes to talking about advertising on the web, finding the right balance is very complicated. On one hand, we know well the reasons that lead a user to block ads, and on the other, we must remember that advertising is a vital resource for millions of portals and online services to keep working for free (by the way, I ask our readers for a humble exception for NeoTeo if they use those filters). The web advertising model has many aspects to improve, something that the creator of pop-ups himself admitted at the time... but one thing is to optimize, and another is to turn every ad into a battlefield.
The real plan behind Brave
Brave is a browser developed by Brendan Eich, creator of the JavaScript language and one of Mozilla's original founders. His plan with Brave is to offer a platform capable of blocking advertising directly, without the intervention of extensions or additional modules. However, what Brave does is not necessarily blocking. It turns out that Brave Software plans to reach several agreements with the most important advertising distributors on the web, which means that Brave will block ads to inject its own on each page. The company's spokespeople have said that its ads will be less invasive and completely anonymous, but in exchange for that administration, they will keep 15 percent of the earnings. The rest of the money is distributed 55 percent to the site, 15 percent to the advertising network, and the remaining 15 percent would go to the user, probably through Bitcoin, and assuming they do not disable the ad replacement (the FAQ confirms this option, but it seems to be opt-out).
The problem with Brave's plan
The most important problem with Brave is not its idea, but how it plans to carry it out. In simple terms, injecting ads is a horrible procedure, a trick taken from the grimoires of malware that can seriously harm all users. Add to this the fact that it will use browsing history to personalize ads, which throws the previous anonymity claims down the toilet. Brave has already received 2.5 million dollars in funding, and to prove that the system works, it will need about seven million users. The first stable version will arrive before the end of the year.
